So if you don't work on core Perl 5, you don't count as a significant Perl contributor? That's pretty limiting, since there are only a few dozen of those people, and Perl 5 is far more than what ships in an individual perl-5.x.x.tar.gz tarball.

You slight literally thousands of CPAN authors with your standards, saying that they are not "significant Perl contributors", and I suspect you're alone in your assessment. CPAN authors who create and maintain the tens of thousands of modules that make up the CPAN, whether little-used or wildly popular like Moose and Dancer, are making Perl 5 a much better place.